The Deep End

I’m not sure what my friend expected when he accepted the dinner invitation extended to him by a member of his congregation.  Maybe pot roast and apple pie.  Perhaps a lot of talk about the weather and church politics.   Surely, he never could have imagined what actually happened.  He described the events of the day this way in an email:

Not ten minutes after eating did we hear what sounded like fire-crackers outside, although the frequency was too erratic. Our host opened the door and stepped on the porch. He almost immediately jumped back in shouting, ”Those aren’t fire-crackers!” I had enough time to look outside to see three policemen, guns drawn advancing on something I couldn’t see before a bullet blew out the windshield of my HHR not 20 yards away. We ran to our kids and pulled them down to the ground until the entire episode was done 15 minutes later. We looked out our window and saw a man laying in the middle of the road. The EMT’s arrived and did chest compressions for some time… the guy never moved and they stopped trying not too much later. Two hours later we were let out of the house after two “witness” interviews with the police, though both our HHR (hit 4 times) and our pickup (hit 2 times) were impounded for evidence and won’t be released until tomorrow. It turns out that the guy showed up at the local Mormon church earlier that day, asked to see their bishop and then shot him. He ran and a few hours later was cornered on the street just outside the house we were visiting. No one knows why…

It’s an amazing (and sad) tale.  And as soon as I read it, I fired back my reply.  ”Wait a second,” I wrote.  ”When did you get a pickup?!”

I think they call that “missing the forest for the trees.”

I thought of this little interaction a few weeks ago while I was preparing a sermon on Matthew 5:27-30.  In this text, Jesus makes the astounding claim that any person who looks at a women with the the purpose of desiring her has already committed an egregious sin.   Did you catch that?  Not any person who casually hooks up with a woman and then refuses to return her calls.   Not any person who spends his Friday nights on sexual safari, always hunting for a new trophy to take home. Not even any person who is married but figures a little fun on the side really won’t hurt anyone (after all, its just sex).

Nope.  Just any person who looks .

That kind of talk about sex sounds crazy in our sex crazed world.  And I suspect that kind of talk is the very thing that makes Christianity unpalatable to many of us.    It sounds too uptight,  repressed, and archaic.   Since we can’t quite swallow what Jesus has to say about sex (or what we think Jesus has to say about sex–or money, or gender roles, or some other hot button issue), so we dismiss Jesus with a wave of the hand, a roll of the eyes, a shaking of th head.   Well, that’s not what I think.  So I don’t want anything to do with a religion that teaches that.

Maybe we don’t put it in such blunt terms.  But the thought is lurking there somewhere under the surface.

The trouble is that objecting to Christianity because of what the Bible has to say about sex makes about as much sense as asking your friend about his new pick-up when he’s just told you that he witnessed a shooting that made national news. In other words–it makes no sense whatsoever! This, too, is missing the forest for the trees.   Like my friend, Christians claim to have big news.  Unlike my friend, it’s good news!  Christ is died!  Christ is risen!  Christ will come again! If we are only willing to engage Christianity on what are, relatively speaking, minor details, then either we’re not listening.  Or somebody told us wrong.

In one of his books, Timothy Keller puts it this way:

“We should make sure we distinguish between the major themes and message of the Bible and its less primary teachings….  If you dive into the shallow end of the Biblical pool…you may get scraped up.  But if you dive in to the center of the Biblical pool, where there is consensus–about the deity of Christ, his death and resurrection–you will be safe.  It is therefore important to consider the Bible’s core claims about who Jesus is and whether he rose from the dead before you reject it for its less central and more controversial teachings.”  (113)

In other words: Keep the main thing the main thing.  Don’t become so fixated on a tree that you miss a bueatiful forest.  I think that’s good advice.  Both for those who are exploring the Christian faith.  And for those who are trying to explain it.